You never see a hat that says "Kiss me I'm Belgian", or a T-shirt proclaiming "The Fighting Norwegian", or a sign in a work cubicle declaring "There are only two types of people in the world – those who are Welsh, and those who want to be". The indomitable Irishry (Yeats's term) sometimes seem to be treated like the world's pets, or its problem children (condescended to, and represented variously as sentimental, irresponsible, violent, drunk). Such characterisation may not be entirely unfair, especially when the Real IRA are threatening to bomb English cities or the taoiseach, Brian Cowen, appears (to be) drunk on the radio, as he did last month, and the Irish economy's been mismanaged so badly that the Celtic tiger's more of a lame duck. Still, in poetry at least we bow to no one.

Growing up I was unnaturally proud of the fact that Ireland, with a 10th of the population, had four Nobel literature prizes compared to England's four (I'm not counting TS Eliot as he was an American by birth). Plus ours were better: we had Beckett, Yeats, Shaw and Heaney; England had Kipling (whom they disown in shame), Galsworthy (whom no one reads), Churchill (whose win had more to do with Hitler than with literature) and William Golding (fair enough). More recently England has pulled ahead with prizes for Lessing and Pinter (though Beckett surely deserves a share of the latter).

Anyway it's clear that Ireland's cultural bequest to the world over the last millennium and a half – Riverdance notwithstanding – lies in the written word, and I've spent the last week or so hoking around in the evidence – the new Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, edited by Patrick Crotty. It's clearly the gleanings of a lifetime's reading, and Crotty has walked a nice line between poetry that deals with Ireland, with questions of Irish character and history, and poetry qua poetry. There are laments and elegies and love poetry, war poetry and ballads and songs, brief lyrics and mythological epics (including a great version of Brian Merriman's "The Midnight Court", including extracts by Frank O'Connor, Thomas Kinsella, Ciaran Carson and Heaney). There's certainly room in these thousand pages to illustrate the best of Irish poetry in English, from elliptical fragments about the coming of Christianity in the sixth century to Alan Gillis's inspired poem about the Combined Loyalist Military Command ceasefire. And there are lyrics here too, from Yeats's "Down by the Salley Gardens", to the great hymn "Be Thou My Vision", to Christy Moore's droll "Lisdoonvarna".

But why should it be that Ireland has such a strong tradition of poetry? The other country that springs to mind with a similar poetic slant is Poland, and there may be a clue in that. Poland has been, even more so than Ireland, a "most distressful country", as the ballad "The Wearing of the Green" has it, subject to the buffetings of history. I have a friend who thinks that only Polish poets should be allowed to write in free verse, after so many razings and rebuildings, after so many border-shifts. Incidentally, in the Nobel literature league table, Poland is on four, the last two in 1980 and 1996, for the poets Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska respectively – though not, shockingly, for Zbigniew Herbert.

Ireland clearly has grievances that animated and motivated its bards and poets, from the encroachment of Christianity to the Norse and British invasions. (Here are some of the anthology's section titles: "Civilizations 1601-1800", "Union and Dissension 1801-80", "Revival 1881-1921", "The Sea of Disappointment 1922-70".) As Auden said of Yeats, "Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry", but a tradition of writing is also self-perpetuating, self-propelling. The historian Arnold Toynbee remarked that history is a series of challenges and responses, and the progress of Irish poetry bears this out: exhortation, encouragement and competition mean the island has a depth and breadth of poetry that is astonishing.

As a witty and humorous example of the call and response, I offer the following. (The first couplet is by Roger Boyle, the Earl of Orrery, 1621-79, and the second by the ever-great Anonymous.)

Lines written on the Gates of Bandon BridgeJew, Infidel, or AtheistMay enter here, but not a Papist.

Response Written on the Gates of Bandon BridgeWho wrote these words composed them well,The same are written on the Gates of Hell.

In any anthology, though, fault is easy to find, and the book could do with dates on the poems and a brief note on the contributors. We find out about the Ulster Presbyterian United Irishman James Orr, who writes in a wiry Ulster Scots, but only in Crotty's scholarly and detailed introduction. I want to know, though, about Emily Lawless, who died in 1913, and wrote powerful, angry, political verse. There's also the problem of absent living poets (and I write as one present). Any contemporary section of a book like this will have a bottleneck, but even so the roll call of the missing is long. Still, the anthologist's role is an invidious one: those included think they should be there anyway, and with many more poems, whereas those left out want you dead. An anthology, though, is one man's vision, and the better for that, and this is the best available single-volume collection of Irish poetry yet published. Now all we need is Muldoon and Banville to win Nobels and Ireland draws level with England.